HERMOSA BEACH, California – Tri Bourne alas did something he has wanted to do for nearly 15 years: Spend a large chunk of the summer in his native Hawaii.

It is both his literal home and where he feels most at home. It is where life comes easiest to the 36-year-old. But beach volleyball is a predominantly summer sport, and instead of Hawaii, Bourne would be in Switzerland and China and Chicago and Germany and Austria and Fort Lauderdale and Hermosa Beach and everywhere else planes and sand goes. Not bad places. Not at all.

They just aren’t Hawaii. Aren’t where he feels most in tune with something the Universe might be telling him.

When he came back to the mainland in mid-July, after a six week sabbatical on the Islands, he did so with a clear mind, and perhaps the biggest decision of his professional career made: He was retiring from professional beach volleyball.

“We’ve been talking about it for the last few years and it finally came to a point where it’s no longer worth it,” he said on this week’s SANDCAST alongside his wife, Gabby. “The juice isn’t worth the squeeze. There’s just so much more out there, so much more to focus on.

“This will be my last month of beach volleyball as a professional after 14 years and I’m going to play Manhattan, go all in, and train for Manhattan and make that my last event. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today.”

The move will come as a surprise to many. Bourne is just 36 years old, still very much in the prime window of his athletic abilities, in a sport that is known for its longevity. Any questions about how much juice, as Bourne likes to say, was left to squeeze out of his game were answered in his lone match at the AVP Huntington Beach Heritage event in May. He and Evan Cory fell to Phil Dalhausser and Trevor Crabb, 17-21, 21-18, 16-18, sure, but Bourne looked very much like the Bourne who has won 10 AVPs and made another nine finals. Afterwards, he even acknowledged that it was nice for him to feel like his old self again.

But it has become increasingly difficult to determine what, exactly, Bourne’s old self is, as he has had to reinvent himself multiple times in a career that is as remarkable as it is snakebitten. Is his “old self” the one who won AVP Rookie of the Year in 2013, FIVB Rookie of the Year in 2014, AVP Team of the Year in 2015, and a bronze medal at the World Tour Finals in 2016?

Or is it the one who sat out for two years with Myositis, a rare and enigmatic autoimmune disease, recovered, won Manhattan twice, led the 2021 Olympic Games in hitting percentage with a partner he’d never before played with, was voted AVP MVP in 2022 and the Team of the Year with Trevor Crabb?

The fact that it is even a discussion of which version of Bourne is his best is extraordinary.

Getting back to that level, while fighting both the normal wear and tear that comes with being a professional athlete as well as an autoimmune disease that increases inflammation and causes weakness in muscles took a toll. Migraines. Back issues. A neck so stiff he could barely turn his head some days. PRP shots. Surgeries. A staggering amount of supplements. Blood transfusions. His pain tolerance grew to such an astonishing level, in fact, that what he felt was modest hip pain was, in actuality, a torn labrum.

Those tolls, when taken day after day, compounded to a point that, to Bourne, who is now a father of two, continuing to play was no longer worth it.

“It feels like I’ve been playing with the brakes on, is kind of the analogy I’ve been using,” he said. “I’m in a bike race but I’m playing with the brakes on and everyone else is biking without them. It doesn’t have to be that way. I can be living or doing a career or doing things where I don’t have the brakes on but I just have to switch tracks or what I’m doing.

“You’re either all in or all out and I was all in for so long and it just feels like it’s coming up quick. It’s not how I pictured it ending. I had a lot more goals in terms of accomplishments, in terms of what I thought I was capable of, so it’s hard in that sense to step back but it also feels right. We’ve sat with it for a few weeks now. We’ve committed to it for the last month or two and tried to sleep on it and see if my brain regrets the decision and it hasn’t. It feels like the right decision to shift the focus to family. It just feels right.”

Bourne is not religious, but he is a believer in Something Bigger. He would often take inventory of his career, the setbacks, the partnerships that didn’t pan out quite like he thought they might, the Olympic quads that continued finishing just short, and wonder if the Universe was telling him something. Why did it always feel as if he were pressing? As if he were fighting some invisible force? Why was he white-knuckling his way through a sport that’s the very anthesis of white-knuckling through anything?

Was this what he was truly meant to be doing anymore?

Then came 2025.

His sponsors fled, all save for Wilson. An attempt to qualify for the AVP League was derailed by an untimely – or perfectly timed, depending on how you look at it – back injury that knocked him out of the first qualifier. A bid at the World Championships was all but stillborn after a number of narrow losses in Mexico to begin the season. He and Evan Cory went to China and played well enough to put Cory on the USA Volleyball stipend – and then they bowed out, Bourne simply running out of gas against a physical Israeli team.

There were no regrets after that loss, no wondering what if he hit this shot or called that defense.

He left the tournament on E.

They did what they came to do.

He could live with that.

He was, at long last, listening to what the Universe had, it seemed, been nudging him to see, gently at first, and then violently, until it just grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him until Bourne stopped fighting it.

“It’s a blessing I think that I’m getting the signs and I’m smart enough to step back and listen,” he said. “In a lot of ways, I haven’t listened and been punished and that was the journey I was on. I was going to be that crazy, world class professional athlete: I’m going to push past the pain.

“[Retirement] was a word we didn’t say before the last year. ‘No, that’s not a thing.’ It came on quick is what I’m saying but it feels right. When I really do the self-work and step back, besides being all in and laser focused, putting the blinders on, when I step back and look at life as a whole, it just makes sense. It’s just where we’re at. There’s so much more. I don’t need to be defined by this one goal I had as a kid and be my only goal or focus.”

So Bourne has listened. Finally gave himself the time and space to let the Universe speak to him, at the place he feels most at home, most alive, most like him: Hawaii. And he has something a great number of professional athletes will never have in the face of their retirement: He has peace.

He knows not what comes next, nor does he need to. All he knows, for now, is he has one more tournament to play, the Grandaddy itself, the Manhattan Beach Open.

The Universe, as if patting him on the head for his acceptance, has been a willing participant in how this next month will play out. His final few weeks of training will be poetic, a pageant of the central characters throughout his career. His training will feature a menagerie of the men who have coached him throughout his professional career. He will step into the player’s box for the final time with his longtime partner, John Hyden, as his coach, and Cory at his side as his partner. Win, lose, it doesn’t so much matter.

He isn’t fighting it anymore.

For Tri Bourne, for this final month, the juice will be well worth the squeeze.